Jesse Winchester

On my desk is sitting a beautiful piece of jewelry, a pendant whose focal point is made from two nautilus shells fused into a stunning iridescent circle.

Ellen C. Chahey

An appreciation

On my desk is sitting a beautiful piece of jewelry, a pendant whose focal point is made from two nautilus shells fused into a stunning iridescent circle.

Jesse Winchester touched that necklace, which I was wearing to set off a black dress, the night he sang at the Wayside Inn in Chatham. My husband and I, having been fans of his for years, of course went to hear him and had invited him to join us after his solo concert for a little glass of wine.

Jesse generally sang and played alone, with just his guitar, and as always melded his beautiful voice, his precise, insightful, and often funny lyrics, his gently dancy tunes, and his skill on that guitar. The room was not large – more the pity for all those Cape Codders who did not come to hear him – but the intimacy of the occasion remains unique among the venues where we’ve heard him: a boat in Boston and also a big concert hall there, and a nightclub as well; coffeehouses in Cambridge; a chapel in Eastham; a converted industrial loft in Fall River; and the mother of our devotion to him, a little hole-in-the-wall in Montreal (the Blue Door, the Green Door, something like that) where at intermission he literally had to step over his audience of twentysomethings (this was the 1970s) to take his break. We have heard him in a church in Marblehead and in a lovely little theater in New Haven.

Back to Chatham. We had sent him a note of invitation to join us, and after the show I met him as he descended the stairs, I guess from his room. If I remember right, he had driven down within a day or two from Montreal, where he lived.

I introduced myself (I had interviewed him by phone for a preview article), and we shook hands. But then he looked at my nautilus and, almost with reverence, quietly asked, “May I touch that? It’s beautiful.”

Then we moved to out little table and the three of us talked of so many things for so long that the staff actually had to ask us to leave because they needed to clean. We literally closed the joint.

In the last couple of years, we began to get reports that Jesse was being treated for cancer. We worried, but then reports started coming in that he was doing well. He had started back on the road, and we went to hear a concert as soon as we could. The hall was mobbed, and he seemed so happy to see all of us, most of whom were twentysomethings in the 1970s.

This Saturday The New York Times reported that Jesse had died the day before, April 11. The damn cancer had come back in another part of his body. He was 69.

My husband and I spent a good chunk of Saturday in tears. I must have read that obit – which was excellent – twenty times hoping that I could make it go away.

Then we listened to a little of Jesse’s music. He had taken to singing a few wistful songs. One is called “I Wave Bye Bye.” Another, which we first heard him sing not so long ago in New Haven, he dedicated to his wife, Cindy. Unusually for him, it was one that someone else had written, but he made it his own as he sang that if he were the first of them to cross over Jordan, he would sit on the far shore with his back to Paradise and draw pictures in the sand until the time would come when they could join hands and walk into Heaven together.

Once, not long ago at all, we even could have heard Jesse in Hyannis. Someone had hired him for a party in a local restaurant; at the last minute, extra seats were made available to the public. Unfortunately, we had made a commitment to another event that evening. Had we been able to go, it would have been the last time we’d have seen him, right here at home.

So, when we heard of Jesse’s death, we staged our own Hyannis evening in his memory. We drove around listening to a CD in the car.

The last song my husband and I could bear to listen to last Saturday was “Little Glass of Wine.” Jesse wrote in that one, “As soon as you learn that you won’t live forever, you’ll grow fond of the fruit of the vine. So here’s to you, and here’s to me, and here is to the ones we’ve left behind.”

We lifted a glass to Jesse in the kind of restaurant that serves the wine in nice balloons that ring when you toast with them. And when we got home, I remembered the nautilus, and put it on my desk.

Jesse’s family responded to requests about memorial donations this way: “Plant an ornamental cherry blossom tree in his memory – he loved these; or, build a simple wooden bench for public or personal use and place it in a pretty spot. Jesse wanted a simple wooden bench for our home, so perhaps there could be other ‘Jesse benches’ out there; or, donate to your favorite charity.”